The Voynich Ninja

I could not find a topic in which to discuss such similarity. There is also a sinusoid with dots, which is on the page.  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.  
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Orbits of planets 44r   You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.  

I am not quite sure this is cosmological. It's a detail from a ms by Hildegard von Bingen that has been discussed by You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). This detail is about the pyramids/mountains that appear in the the central and top-middle circles of the Rosette foldout. I will try to see if I can get any hint about their meaning from the text.

The illustrations in this manuscript are amazing: have a look if you haven't yet.

Hildegard, Sci vias is online (Migne PL 197): You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

I've often wondered if these textures in the rosettes (particularly the central rosette) were explicitly meant to represent air/earth/water/fire.

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(09-09-2017, 05:44 PM)Helmut Winkler Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hildegard, Sci vias is online (Migne PL 197): You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Hi Helmut, that's very helpful! Yet I have been unable to find any specific explanation. I guess the illustration is about the end of the XII Vision (not the beginning of the XIII). 

Et  sic electi splendorem aeternitatis habentes, una
cum capite suo, scilicet Filio meo, et cum glorioso
coelesti exercitu in magna gloria coelestia gaudia
petunt... - 728,D

So the elected have the splendor of eternity, together
with their leader, i.e. my Son, and the glorious
heavenly army, gaining in great glory celestial
happiness...

But what are those mountain-like pyramids?

There are seven of them. Jerusalem, Rome, Byzantium... were built on seven hills.

Currently I do not have the time or energy to look into this, but please regarding Hildegard take extra care 
and carefully research with which drawings you are working.  Many drawings have been added later.

This is an illustration from the lost Rupertsberg Scivias (color copies were made in 1930 ca).



Book 1, Vision 3 (thanks again to Helmut for pointing out You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.!)

The text gives an extensive description of the vision, first as a cosmology, then as a Christian allegory. The subject of the Vision is the Universe, seen as an enormous egg. The vision is described in layers, moving from the outside towards the inside:

• The exterior (painted yellow in the illustration) is made of fire. In this flaming layer there is a large globe of fire (the sun) above which there are three smaller flames (the three planets Mars, Jupiter, Saturn). Fiery winds blow in this region.
  
• Immediately below this outer layer there is a “dark skin” (pellem umbrosam): this layer if filled with a “dark fire” (tenebrosus ignis) and violent thunder storms with sharp stones of all sizes carried around by the winds.
  
• Then there is “the purest ether” (purissimus aether”), with a large white globe (the Moon) and two smaller flames (Mercury and Venus). In the ether there are several other bright spheres (the fixed stars - “multae et clarae sphere”). Ether has its own winds which spread light to all the stars.
  
• Below there is a layer of “watery air” (aquosum aerem) providing humidity to the whole giant egg. The winds that move this fluid cause rain.
  
• In the middle there is a globe of sand (“arenosus globus”). In this globe, Hildegard sees a huge mountain (“maximum montem”) one side of which is illuminated, the other dark.
  

I will not go into the details of the Christian allegory, but you can find a discussion (in German) You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

This cosmograph differs from the standard Ptolemaic model in several ways:

• it is not spherical, but egg-shaped
  
• the planets are not discussed as each having its own sphere
  
• the layer of dark fire beyond ether
  
• the presence of different groups of winds in different layers
  
• a mountain at the center of the universe
  

The graphical “mountain-pattern” that appears at the center clearly illustrates the “globe of sand” and possibly the Great Mountain. Similar graphical patterns seem to erupt the “dark fire” in the black layer. These can be again compared with details of the Rosettes diagram, but they are more irregular, less constantly triangular. Still it's quite interesting that flames are coming out of them, since "something" also seems to come out of the Voynich "pyramids".

Overall, I find the illustration an interesting parallel because it provides an unconventional cosmograph of considerable complexity. In particular, the number of winds, flows and fluids described by Hildegard suggest something more chaotic than the perfect circular rotation of the Ptolemaic system. I have the impression that the Rosettes diagram might be describing something similar.

I will likely come back to the illustrations of this lost ms, since there are other details that can be interestingly compared with the VMS.

Marco, that last one is particularly good.


When I posted upthread about the VMS textures (especially the central rosette) perhaps being explicitly earth/air/fire/water, one of the problems was trying to ascertain which was which. Pipes could be air (nothing is coming out of the ones in the center rosette) or they could be water (water flows through pipes). The dotted texture also could be either air or water.

The scalloped shapes I've always suspected might be earth and the flame-like shapes I've always suspected might be fire, but just as the "elements" diagram earlier in the VMS (assuming its elements or humors or something along those lines) have a couple that seem almost deliberately ambiguous, and so do the rosettes.


But that last image you depicted, with the "rocks" (the scalloped texture) heaped up in piles with the flames coming out of them, when presented in that way, are reminiscent of volcanoes, which represent both earth and fire, and I wonder if that is what inspired the odd medieval diagrams of things like look like piles of rocks. Volcanoes aren't exactly piles of rocks, but in classical and medieval society once something is drawn that way, it gets copied that way, so perhaps that's why we see "piles of rocks" on the edges of medieval cosmological diagrams.



In fact, in some ways, one could take it a step farther. Hildegard von Bingen was the kind of person who saw things in interesting ways as apparently did the author of the VMS and maybe she and perhaps the VMS author saw volcanoes as the embodiment of all the elements. They have earth, they have fire, they have air (the hot vapors that escape even before there is an eruption) and they have "water" (liquid) in the form of both steam and lava.

So in some diagrams, maybe that heap of stones isn't just earth, or earth and fire when it has red flames coming out of it, maybe in some cases it means earth/air/water/fire or earth and something else (since air, fire, water, and earth all spew from volcanoes). In other words, if something is coming out of a volcano-like triangular heap of rocks in the VMS, it doesn't automatically have to be fire, it could be any of the elements which would make it a little easier to interpret the round dots as not necessarily being fire, but still being similar to those other medieval drawings in concept.



You know, until I looked at the last drawing you posted (with the heaps and flames), I never thought of volcanoes as the iconic embodiment of all the elements but in a sense, they are and it also occurred to me if you simply drew it as a triangle (to mean mountain), it would be hard to tell what it is, but if you drew it as a heap of rocks, it would be recognizable (active volcanoes always have stuff strewn all over their banks from previous eruptions).



I also noticed some visual similarities between this, the VMS, and some zodiac imagery (the similarities are not necessarily direct in terms of meaning, but possibly in terms of thematic medieval representation):

I'm probably overlooking some obvious explanation, but why the disks for Jupiter?